Book of Numbers

A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search--for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet.

"More impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade . . . a wheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean . . . [Joshua] Cohen, all of thirty-four, emerges as a major American writer."-- The New York Times

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world's most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication.

Insider tech expos#65533;, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual.

Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

Please note that Book of Numbers uses a special pagination system inspired by binary notation: the part number precedes the page number, and is separated from it by a decimal point.

Praise for Book of Numbers

"The Great American Internet Novel is here. . . . Book of Numbers is a fascinating look at the dark heart of the Web. . . . A page-turner about life under the veil of digital surveillance . . . one of the best novels ever written about the Internet." -- Rolling Stone

"A startlingly talented novelist . . . [His] deeply rewarding novel is about an online religion gone wrong--and its importance lies in the fact that nearly all of us in the modernized world are members of that faith, whether we know it or not." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Remarkable . . . dazzling . . . Cohen's literary gifts . . . suggest that something is possible, that something still might be done to safeguard whatever it is that makes us human." --Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books

"A hugely ambitious novel set in the high-tech world of now . . . a verbal high-wire act, daring in its tones and textures: clever, poetic, fast-moving, deeply playful, filled with jokes, savvy about machines, wise about people, dazzling and engrossing." --Colm T#65533;ib#65533;n, The Guardian

"Joshua Cohen is the Great American Novelist. . . . Like Pynchon and Wallace, Cohen can write with tireless virtuosity about absolutely everything." --Adam Kirsch, Tablet

"A digital-age Ulysses ." -- The New York Times Book Review

"The next candidate for the Great American Novel . . . David Foster Wallace-level audacious." -- Details

Opinion

From the critics

Community Activity

Comment

I am apparently too unsophisticated to appreciate this rambling, unfocused line of drivel. The author can't maintain a train of thought for two sentences in a row. I an unwilling to do the work for him. Quit after the first Chapter because this book goes nowhere and takes a lot of words to do it.

This book has received many positive reviews from many well regarded magazines and newspapers. I got through 200 pages and there started to be a lot of literary tricks and needless gimmicks such as graphs and sentences that have lines through them since at that point we're reading a rough draft of the manuscript about one Joshua Cohen by a different Joshua Cohen. I put it down at that point.
I once read that Tom Wolfe once said that writers tend to write their first book which is about something, then they don't have any idea what to write next so they write about a writer who doesn't have any ideas and just sort of wanders around and struggles. He didn't mean this as a compliment. The first 200 pages of this book was just what he described.
This is one of those books that tries to be about everything, and uses needlessly complex language and weaves in current and past history to make it at least seem important. This book includes the narrators insight on everything from 9/11, Middle East politics, suicide bombing, the history of the United States military draft and the history of computer programming. But overall I found it solipsistic. Not only is the narrator named Joshua Cohen, but the subject of his biography is Joshua Conen. So this is a book written by Joshua Cohen about Joshua Cohen who is writing about Joshua Cohen. Kind of like Tyler Perry presents a Tyler Perry production directed by Tyler Perry.
Anyway, I know I didn't read the whole thing but I can spot something that seems false wrapped in intellectualism to appease high brow critics who love post modernism after a good 200 pages.
I felt the same way reading David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. Maybe too smart for its own good, and maybe critics like it so they won't feel like they'd be singled out as anti intellectual or just "not getting it" by their peers.
Maybe I'll finish it at a later time, but don't feel bad or dumb if you put this one aside.